Botanic garden completes 20-year NYC plant survey

The American bittersweet and the coastal violet, species native to the New York metropolitan region whose numbers are now dwindling.

Scientists at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG) recently completed a 20-year comprehensive study of plant biodiversity in metropolitan New York. The impressive New York Metropolitan Flora project has cataloged plant populations in every county within a 50-mile radius of New York City. The study has helped in noting changes in biodiversity and identifying native species being crowded out by invasives or wiped out by human development; the BBG has nursed some of these threatened species in its native plant garden in an effort to preserve, harvest seed from and restart propogation of those plants, in support of the plants’ own continued existence as well as that of insect, bird and other animal species dependent on them.